The UN has blocked the nuclear industry from participating in an international forum on clean energy, sparking accusations of institutional bias within the global body.
The London-based World Nuclear Association was originally accepted by the organisers of next month’s Sustainable Innovation Forum as a £40,000 ($68,338) gold sponsor, but the deal was rescinded a week later after intervention by the UN environment program.
The organisers then offered a watered-down sponsorship that would include no branding presence, but that deal was also vetoed by UNEP.
David Hess, communications manager and policy analyst with the WNA, said the group had hoped the conference could be the start of a “mature conversation” about the role nuclear energy could play in supporting the transition to a zero-emissions world.
He said the group was very disappointed to be excluded.
“We certainly weren’t expecting UNEP to transform overnight or change its messaging or come out in support of nuclear energy, but we did want to make the outreach as part of a high-level environmental discussion,” Mr Hess told The Australian.
“We thought we’d make a breakthrough and thought we’d be there, but it turned out we were subjected to the bias that we had wondered whether it existed in the first place.”
Next month’s forum takes place on the sidelines of the UN’s COP 23 climate change conference, where government representatives from around the world will meet to discuss progress towards meeting international emission-reduction targets.
The Sustainable Innovation Forum will be hosted in the purpose-built Climate Action Dome, which itself will be powered by energy generated using food waste from the conference.
The forum’s approved sponsors include BMW and Toyota — responsible for a large portion of the world’s petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles — as well as utilities such as Orsted which continue to own coal-fired power plants. Last year’s sponsors included German utility Vattenfall, which generates much of its electricity from coal.
Mr Hess said nuclear energy was one of the few realistic solutions to the UN’s competing goals of decarbonising the world while also lifting more than a billion people out of energy poverty. “How are you supposed to seriously address these really complicated problems when you completely ignore or exclude a major low-carbon, low-land-footprint energy technology from the equation? It just doesn’t make sense but this is what we see taking place, because a lot of these high-level policy bodies seem to be afraid of backlash. They seem to be afraid of the attention that would be generated by green groups. They need to be able to talk about this seriously.”
Naysán Sahba, a spokesman for UNEP, said that within the UN system the environment arm deferred to the International Atomic Energy Agency on nuclear issues. “We prioritise the renewables revolution, such as wind and solar energy, as well as encouraging the ongoing shift from fossil fuel,’’ Mr Sahba said.
“Our work on the nuclear sector is limited.”
Ben Heard, an energy researcher with the University of Adelaide and an advocate for the climate benefits of nuclear energy, described the UN’s intervention as “frightening” and an example of “outright prejudice”. “This family of technologies has been the principal source of carbon-free energy for the last four decades. Along with hydro-electricity, they have been the two big hitters that have actually delivered, and you’re running a climate change conference and you won’t let the representatives of that industry through the door,” he said.
“For me it’s gobsmacking to see this. I’m an advocate for this technology on environmental grounds but it struggles, and part of the reason is time after time it faces this kind of institutional bias which means no-one can even have a conversation about it.”
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